Steve Brossman explains how his company sold nearly 4 million units by targeting municipalities and property owners with litter-reduction programs instead of selling directly to smokers. Direct-to-consumer would have moved under 100,000 units. The shift from product to solution created the scale.
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And it was all to do with standing out, delivering, but delivering what the consumer wanted. Now, the smoker wanted something fun and funky and they weren't being hit over the head with a stick. But the biggest things, our customers were not the consumers. Our customers were the municipalities, the corporates, the people who owned the places that were dirty and filthy. So we actually created— this is a big thing that we teach people— we created programs, not selling the pieces. So we created cigarette butt litter reduction programs that taught people how to run them. And by the way, yes, they did contain hundreds or thousands of our units, and that's why it worked. So we, out of the 4 million, we probably would have sold less than 100,000 directly to the smokers. But we sold virtually 4 million to solve a problem.